Month: January 2026

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Bombal

“Hey Alexa, play the Ghostbusters theme song”

To give credit where credit is due that was at least more readable than the previous texts. That being said, I need someone to draw up a family tree of all of the names that popped up because goddamn was that a lot. I admittedly confused the names of Antonio and Alberto at one point, and it was a whole thing because nothing was making sense. I managed to convince myself that somehow it was a Jr. and Sr. situation… I don’t know either.

I will say that sometimes the writing style confused me as well, with the constant flipping between multiple different perspective/points of view, alongside incredibly long dialogue sections. At times I had a hard time figuring out who was speaking and about what/who. There were sections that have repeated introductions, and at times I genuinely thought I was going insane and had somehow managed to reread the same pages repeatedly without realizing.

While I can appreciate that the people were relatively realistic, as in everyone was terrible, except for maybe Maria Griselda who was just there for a lot of it, it was kind of tiring to me. At least, Maria Griselda wasn’t much of an active participant in the casual cruelty occuring from the other characters, she was more the indirect recipient. Even Sofia, who was usually one of the least bad characters, was still kind of a jerk, even if she thought she was doing it for the right reasons (and for fear for her life). I understand that Ana Maria is not a reliable narrator for any of this, but still, at the end of the day the people here just sucked. Severely. It does make you wonder how much the actual events deviated from Ana Maria’s memories, especially considering we don’t know how far back these memories are. Over time, especially for memories people go over time and time again, and thus have to re-encode, memories get warped. So considering she obviously thought of these events often, how warped do you think this all is? How unreliable is our unreliable narrator? Did she purposefully gloss over details she didn’t wish to remember, despite it being ‘involuntary’? Is there exaggeration?

I think half of this life ‘flashing before the eyes’ would’ve been less annoying and depressing if Ana Maria and Sofia just kissed from the start and tossed aside the men entirely. It would’ve saved so much time, energy, and sorrow.

One of my favourite parts was of her heading towards her ‘true’ death: “Resigned, she lays her cheek against the hollow shoulder of death” (p.231). It reminds me of a post someone made (probably on twitter or similar), which was “I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room”. The way Bombal describes her laying her cheek against death’s shoulder reminds me so much of that sensation of being carried as a child, oftentimes while feigning sleep. It makes death as a whole feel less scary, oddly enough.

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Andre, hun, with all the love in the world, have you considered therapy?

I really thought that after Proust, the texts would get significantly more comprehensible. Wrong. I can’t even articulate my thoughts through the entire beginning of the text on here because it includes so much profanity. It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something because where does the whole play from the start come into relevance? I mean he was like “the girl is coerced into lying to her grandmother to stay at the boarding school… fast forward, the girl’s mangled body tumbled out of the cabinet” and that was the end of it? Don’t get me wrong, it left an impression, but also… what? Unless it was to introduce the absolute insanity that permeated the rest, I don’t understand. It felt like only the middle made partial sense and even then it felt very achronological.

Admittedly, I’m kind of unsure who the crazy(-est?) one is in this relationship: Nadja, Andre, or both, because wow there is so much wrong here. Nadja kind of comes across like she’s half-living in another world, she reminds me of a more aggressive Luna Lovegood (if that makes sense). I’m not sure whether she’s supposed to be connected to some sort of witchcraft or just genuinely mentally unwell, but that certainly was a ride to get through. I would have gotten sick of her so quickly, which makes me think that Andre must have some kind of residual trauma going on, because genuinely what was wrong with him? Sir, you are married.

That being said, the text introduces some interesting questions and concepts. Right from the beginning is the introduction of “Who am I?”, which has its own set of interesting philisophical implications, albeit relatively common. Instead, an aspect that really stood out to me was the idea of ‘is it possible to truly know who others are?’. The quote “as a dream about someone resembles that person in reality. It is, and at the same time is not, the same person; a slight and mysterious transfiguration is apparent in the features” intrigues me because it begs the question of, since we can only interpret a person through our own lens, can we can ever truly see someone as anything other than a distorted version of themselves? Could we ever know?

Another thing that really caught my attention was comments about the difficulty of psychiatric release, even if no longer necessary. It reminded me of an experiment done in the 1970s, where participants falsified a single symptom to get institutionalized, but upon arrival dropped it to see whether psychiatrists would be able to differentiate ‘insanity’. Not only were participants not released, but their behaviour was considered ‘symptoms of illness’ and resulted in further diagnosis of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Only after ‘admitting’ to being sick and ‘taking’ medication, were they released, not for realization of stability or error, but because the psychiatrists thought they were currently asymptomatic enough. The fact that this book brings up the same issues as a study from 50 years later is a concern.

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Proust…. I think?

Let me just start off by saying that that was not even remotely what I expected. This felt like a fever dream, I have reread sections and still don’t totally know what the point of some of that was. It felt like it was flitting back and forth between things, or going on tangents, and either brushed past things or focused on others (not always relevant, at least in my opinion) with extreme detail. It kind felt like early 1900s male equivalent of a middle-school girl’s diary. I think it may partially go back to the lack of ‘standard story structure’, of which I simply am not accustomed. It constantly felt as though I was missing connections or details.

That being said, I don’t think it necessarily makes it ‘bad writing’, as so much goes back to the intentions of the writer, but it certainly isn’t the commonplace format, which made it difficult for me to comprehend at times. It certainly made me question my literacy and general literary skills. Though, I think that’s a good thing despite how humbling it was, a large part of why I chose this course was to look at different perspectives I may not come into contact with as often, and while I would prefer to have those perspectives be a bit more comprehensible, beggers can’t be choosers.

While those were my intial thoughts and they still hold true, I have to consider the goals of literary modernism, trying to make it ‘new’ so to speak and bypassing the traditional literary patterns. In that sense, I would say Proust succeeded in that endevour. It is not traditional, it is not standard.

Honestly, some of the detailed points of the story were so odd to me, right from the very start. There is a substantial bit of writing at the beginning that is focusing on how the boy is laying in bed and what his room is like, but in many ways none of that was relevant, it was a lead into his memories of Combray and these details were not referrenced meaningfully going forward. While the writing often paints beautiful images in your mind (such as the madeleines with tea), it also almost provided too much detail at times, to the point it felt like it lost it’s purpose.

Once the story got past the scene of the boy talking very dramatically for a long paragraph over wanting his mother to kiss him late into the night and more than once (Freudian who?), and M. Swann was introduced, it felt like it was coming together a bit more, at least for a while. Overall, I found the quote: “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh trivility or other every day” rather ironic, because that’s what this book feels like to me, fresh trivility each page, which may be intentional.

That all being said, I hope the class conversation helps with all this!

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Introduction!

Hello! I’m Ava. I’m a second year psychology student and have absolutely no idea what I would like to do with that degree! (I’m living in denial of having to figure it out). I’m currently taking five courses alongside work, so I’m admittedly hoping this course has some ebbs and flows to the work level. I was born and raised here in Vancouver, but would ideally like to do Go Global at some point during my time at UBC. In my free time I enjoy doing puzzles, listening to music, and playing volleyball.

My course schedule as a whole required an overhaul and this course caught my eye, that being said, as such I came into this course with very little expectations beyond ideally not drowning in work. Though I enjoy reading and generally read a good bit, the amount of older translated literature I tend to read is rather low so I’m hoping this course may spark a bit more of an interest in that regard. Additionally, admittedly reading for enjoyment has taken a bit of a backburner for me as of late, as the swaths of schoolwork and textbook readings have prioritized my time, and made me dread having to read any more than I already have. Despite all of this, I have decently high hopes for this course’s methodology, as contract grading seems like an interesting idea to keep expectations clear and reduce grade anxiety (of which I have much). Ideally, this will be an interesting and engaging course which allows enough freedom to not seem stifling, but enough structure to explore various ideas and perspectives I don’t tend to naturally interact with. I don’t personally enjoy writing literature, which has stopped me from persuing a large portion of other English or Literature courses, which also may have facilitated interacitons with a wider variety of viewpoints, so I hope that this being more reading and discussion focused will fit me a bit better.

In regard to the question “Where is the Romance World?” found within the lecture, I would argue that the romance world cannot be a physical place in any sense of the word. Though the romance languages are a language family/group, that doesn’t give it physiological substance or a ‘world’. In this case, my instinctual response to the question of “Where is the Romance World?”, is that the question should instead be “What is, or would be the Romance World?”, should it exist in any medium. If essentially every boundary separating entities of all kinds, including land, is fiction, then how could the “Romance World” be truly separated out from any other? Who would, in theory, decide what that entailed? Rather, I’d argue it is an abstract if anything, accessible by those who wish to explore it linguistically, through any means, but not physically.

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